Fig. 2

Schematic overview of the main within host dynamics. A simplified representation of the main immune and parasite dynamics for a Molineaux et al. and Johnston et al., b Challenger et al., c Gatton et al., d Mckenzie and Bossert, e Eckhoff, f Gurarie et al., and g Childs and Buckee. Each model is represented by the main parasite components (left box), the host-immune component (right box) and additional factors influencing parasite dynamics (bottom circles). Models either describe overall infected red blood cells (iRBC) or total iRBC result from a sum of variant specific iRBC (var 1,..,i). Asexual multiplication (m) and variant switching of the parasite are represented by black arrows, and feedbacks between parasite and host components are represented by green arrows or red bar-headed lines for positive or negative effects, respectively. The weaker effect due to cross-reactive immune response is represented by dashed bar-headed lines. A more detailed description of the models can be found in the supplementary material, or in the source publications [17, 18, 21,22,23,24,25,26]